


someone bless the seeds I sow (someone warm them from below)

by hypotheticalfanfic



Series: rogue one collex [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-14
Updated: 2017-04-14
Packaged: 2018-10-18 23:44:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10627668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hypotheticalfanfic/pseuds/hypotheticalfanfic
Summary: The PROFUNDITY, her crew, the Alderaan Guards: each a seed, each a start.





	

Some things change, some things stay the same. The ship’s old name, _Radisson_ , still showed in the right light. Scarif’s sun in those last moments had gleamed on the old letters, had brightened the fresh paint; had anyone seen it who survived, it would have been a lovely image to use on propaganda posters. The old Empire and the new Rebellion, gleaming together one last time. But the few who survived Scarif didn’t see it, and the dead can only rarely share their visions with the living.

When the _Radisson_ defected, crew aboard, they stripped out most of the Empire’s marks. Flags and serial numbers, portraits and regulation manuals: all went out into the vacuum of space, all left in their wake. The name had to go, too. Admiral Raddus had been proud as punch the day it’d been christened in his honor, and some small part of him mourned its erasure, but they let him name it, the Rebellion did. _Profundity_ was a bit ham-fisted (he could hear his wife, brilliant and beautiful and bolder than was safe, make fun of him in his head), but he liked the name. Liked the grandeur of it, the scope. “A rebellion built on hope,” he wrote in his data log, “must have, too, a sense of inevitability, of fate. We cannot let the Empire define elegance and stateliness, or we will forever be scruffy and low-class.” His officers might disagree, he knew, but Raddus for all his faults was still a part of the old guard, still put stock in manners and the look of things.

He understood well enough _esprit de corps_ , being the poor wild rebels rising up against the rich human-centric Empire, how that might work for the younger ones. For him, what worked was proving in every small way he could that the Empire had no monopoly on what was good, proper, noble. He’d had many a conversation with a young crew member wherein they had, together, rehashed the concept of a coalition: you have your reasons and I have mine, but our aim is the same, and that’s what matters now. As Vader’s rage tore through his ship, Raddus thought that one day, after all of this, the young would have to grapple with the range of motivations and methods they’d used. For now, what mattered was the end. The means were anything that worked.

The crew of the _Profundity_ was hundreds strong, many species, many genders. Seven crew members were pregnant. Many were married couples - Raddus liked the family unit as a concept. He took pains to keep enlisted beings together if he could. No children were aboard. That was his one request.

The cook was a huge Gilliand, her staff a hodgepodge of aquatics. She had a name, once, but days into her first voyage she’d been named Mother and it had never gone away. When the blows landed, Mother and her flock tucked themselves into the mess. Huge freezers and 3-D printers and heavy pots and pans - they could all be weapons. Mother had grown up in a home where learning to arm oneself with whatever was at hand was demanded. Her staff shivered, stood behind her bulk. When the stormtroopers burned through their blast door, they found a fight they’d not expected. Mother was killed, the rest hauled off, but they carried with them always the memory of her roar, her fierce love, her shelter.

Janitorial droids weren’t given to deep thoughts in general. Their programming was more fluid than some organics thought, almost a hivemind. This was on purpose, an efficiency measure so they could distribute duties evenly. When a small one by the hull first noticed the ash, the smoke, the burn, it took them a moment to write a theory, to coordinate a response. No one thought of janitorial droids as defensive weapons, as weapons at all. A bushel of stormtroopers learned, to their peril, to never underestimate an ankle-high rolling box in a battle situation. Especially when the ankle-high rolling box’s sole function was to polish floors.

 _Profundity_ ’s engines were far from top-of-the-line, but a mad genius like Mora Abraxas could have taken two rocks and a band and built a speeder out of it. Give her a huge engine room and a crew of frustrated engineers, give them a few minutes to plan, give them almost no hope of survival. See what blows up, and how prettily, and how many enemies are shredded with shrapnel and flooded with radiation.

Each fighter still in the hold was armed, stocked, and their crew pressed buttons and aimed and died firing. Each peace officer and mechanic carried something that could be a weapon, a taser or a sabre or a heavy metal wrench. Not one gave up without a fight. Many were killed. Many more never recovered. All planted a seed, a piece of video or a survivor’s memory or a recurring dream in the head of a stormtrooper. None were wasted.

* * *

Alderaan’s royal guard traditionally wore what they (amongst themselves, never to others) called duckbills, the sloping white helmets meant to invoke a speeding ship or a streaking comet. There were a dozen, maybe more of them, and the data transfer was taking too long. “ _Tantive_ ’s got to leave,” Guard Mahmoud shouted, “hurry!” His voice was rough, afraid; his mind was half on the ticking of an internal clock, half (more than half, all but the barest part) on his wife and seven children at home. He had left for this mission with no fear, no hesitation: the royal family had asked for him and he had answered, and he is glad, for certain values of glad, that he had kissed his wife and the brood with a “see you soon” and not a “good-bye.” A silly superstition in peacetime, but it would mean something now.

Even in this moment, Guard Astrid’s cold voice hid her panic well enough - the number of times she’d kept her cool when all about her ran in circles was too high to count. “If I could make the data go faster, I would.” Her fingers flew on the typepad, her bright eyes tracked the slow progress of the download. She’d torn this computer system apart and rebuilt it more than once, hunting bugs down. As a side project, in the long trips across the galaxy, she’d spent hours and hours trying to increase the data transfer speed. She’d improved it some, and all she could muster was a hope that it was fast enough now, that it would work. No shower of sparks, no sudden blank screen. “Please, baby, please do the job,” she whispered to it as the transfer crept slowly on.

At the hatch, a low murmur of prayers (the same tone, different words) tumbled from the mouth of Guard Berlyn, in a language most Alderaanians could barely stumble through on ritual days. He clasped his blaster in one hand; with the other, he clutched the shoulder of Guard Krennic, who had carried him through this, his first mission. She had so many times started to change her name, shed her cousin’s stain, but in the mirror in her room she saw her own face, her mother’s, not a trace of him; that other Krennic had shamed their name, not the other way around. She’d carried Berlyn through, and half a dozen guards before him, and she had known her whole life that her death would come as a barrier to keep some spark of something going.

Guard Vilar called to open fire. She had never before fired her blaster at another living being, excepting those birds that month in training. Her wife and son were already prisoners. She held a tiny ball of hope that she might join them in prison, but knew as the red light flooded the dark that she would see them again in the world beyond this.

Guard Katra fired first. The youngest of a military family, they were the only defector. They had only recently joined the ship. Their uniform didn’t quite fit. They had a fitting next week.

Guard Estabel and Guard Zhou were next. The Twins, their cohort called them: they looked enough alike, but it was more that their movements mirrored each other so well. They raised their blasters, had a moment of doubt (blasters dipped, not quite dropped), steeled their resolve, aimed as one.

It was Guard Mothma (no relation) who held his hand through the gap, who handed the disk through, whose voice was the last sound to leave that ship. He was the oldest of them all, had been a guard longer than some of them had been alive. He had realized too late what his end would be, had tried too long to get the blasted door open. He died knowing, though, that the guard he’d handed it to had made it at least a little further.

Guard Ahmed-Shin, Guard Bull, Guard Romanova, all with lives. All with people back home or already dead, all with hopes and dreams. All had a moment when they could have given up, could have surrendered. The man in black would likely have ignored their plea, but they could have tried. Bull thought of it the longest, but saw her sister’s face after stormtroopers had attacked their city, and did not. Ahmed-Shin and Romanova shared a glance, full of the things they had avoided saying to each other for a year and a day, and took some solace in knowing that at least the other had felt the same.

Any one of them stopped, any one of them fallen, any one of them given up in despair, and the disk never got through, and all ended in flames and failure. Leia Organa will not know until much later what happened in that bay. The security vid is grainy, dim, and it jerks as blaster fire impacts shake the ship. She cannot pick out individual faces, not with her bare eyes. The techs work on the quality, get a timeline set out. She sees only body movements, only the ways they stay at their posts. There’s no audio on the main feed, no record of what was said. When the techs enhance the video, an Aaroun analyst read their lips. They had, in the end, been so much themselves that just reading the transcript Leia wept. She wept again when their names were confirmed. They had, all of them, chosen this and not chosen it at the same time. They had been thrown to the situation, and chosen to stay in it until the bitter end. They had given the last full measure, and nothing would ever make it right.

* * *

Some time later, just after Leia Organa became General Organa, when the Empire’s fall was still new enough to look like forever, she took some time. Took a Hammerhead corvette from the decimated fleet, flew to a central place. There, on her invitation, were their families. She had known the Guards, not as well as she’d liked, but she sat with each guard’s people, shared a memory, touched their hands. Some had no family to speak of: Guard Mahmoud’s had all died when Alderaan did. Berlyn’s, too, and Vilar’s had died in the Empire’s clutches, and Katra’s had died or disappeared. Bull’s sister had been on a cargo ship when the planet blew. Astrid’s new husband had already been inside _Tantive_ , and if he had trouble meeting the General’s eyes she understood. Guard Krennic’s parents had been evacuated to a space station before the mission (fear of death threats, even on Alderaan). Estabel and Zhou had never had family to speak of anyway, and Ahmed-Shin and Romanova had come from huge sprawling multi-planet clans. When those two groups met, when the General told them what had been beginning between their lost loved ones, they flooded together, mourning as one family, as if the two slain guards had already married.

It was Ziva Raddus, though, who was the hardest to face. Leia had admired the Admiral her whole life, and his wife had been a family friend. Ziva was terrifying even when smiling - perhaps especially when smiling. The Mon Calamari were not necessarily seen by outsiders as cunning, as brilliant, as tactical geniuses. This was a mistake. Most of them could beat any tactical droid with no preparation - Ziva could do it in her sleep. She was, too, outspoken and funny and brimming with anger even before the Empire had thrown her into a political work camp. The injuries there had taken some of her beauty, but her rage had sharpened to a point so fine Leia felt its constant stab when they spoke.

Leia had spent weeks planning what she would say. She had chosen, in the end, to greet Ziva with a bow and, “The Admiral was a terrible enemy to face, and a terrifying ally.” It was a bad translation of a Mon Cala proverb, and it made Ziva smile.

“They all,” Ziva said, looking at the large holo of the _Profundity_ crew and the Alderaanian guards, “they all died. For this. Will it be worth it, your highness?”

“They gave us hope.” The General looked down at her hands, which had held the blood-stained disk so tightly they’d ached for days after. “They gave us what we needed.”

“And the ones on the planet, the rogues. They died, too. And the squadron.” Ziva looked at the throng of survivors, saw smiles and tears and clasped hands. “So many dead. So few unscarred.”

“Your husband—“

“Rebellion, built on hope, is one thing.” She fixed the General with her unsettling stare. “Governing. Building a people, a world, a galaxy. That’s different. Harder.”

“That’s why I asked you to come, Ziva.” Leia took a deep breath. “You are smarter than half the beings on the Council, and you’re ruthless, and I need you.”

“To?” Her voice betrayed nothing.

“Help me do this.”

“Just you?” a hint of amusement.

“Me, Mon Mothma, a few others.” Leia gambled. “Or, Oberin Carver, you remember him?”

“The saboteur, yes, I do.” Ziva nearly laughed. “Raddus hated him so. I found him delightful.”

“He’s running a small moon now, a sort of cobbled-together haven. Orphans, mostly. You could go there instead. Devote yourself to good works and charity for the rest of your days.”

Ziva stared. Snorted. “I bet they’d build a statue of me after I died of boredom.”

“Or name the building after you.”

The Mon Calamari laughed for real this time. “Silly.”

“There must be some room for silliness, even here.”

“So they say. You want me to politick for you?”

“Very, very much.”

A smile, not a mean one but a small one, spread over her face. “Who am I to say no to a General?”

“An Admiral, I think.”

“There must always be an Admiral Raddus, then?”

“We should be so lucky.”

**Author's Note:**

> title from "Garden Song" by John Denver
> 
> It's entirely possible the stated gender(s) and actions of the guards in this aren't 1:1 with the scenes shown. I honestly have a hard time watching that sequence because I cry every time. Let's pretend I watched the grainy security vid version.


End file.
